Sarah Vowell is the author, most recently, of The Partly Cloudy Patriot (Simon & Schuster), as well as the collections Radio On: A Listener’s Diary and Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World, and a frequent contributor to National Public Radio. She was interviewed by telephone by Elisa Ludwig, a member of the 215 Festival’s organizing committee.

City Paper: Do you think your passion for politics is unusual for someone of your generation?

Sarah Vowell: I don't think so. But if you care at all you distinguish yourself as political. I mean, I care about these things and certainly I write about them, but all I do is vote and read the paper and care. I don't care or follow it any more than I do the TV season or what's at the movies. I'm just interested in our culture.

SV: People always ask me what my goals are, and I have to say I'm a pretty selfish writer. Hopefully on a good day I am entertaining someone for a minute. But I care about narrative pacing -- that's the kind of effect I'm interested in having. To me, the unsung heroes of democracy are the wire service reporters who go in and listen to the boring drudgery in our state legislatures. What I do is a lark.

SV: I would say I took part in political activity at one time--I like that better than activism; it sounds like soccer. And also because we were really nice kids with really nice parents who got together to photocopy pie charts of defense spending and hand them out in supermarket parking lots. I was involved in the anti-nuclear war group when I was 15 or 16. This was in 1985. I don't know what good that did, but it was sort of upbeat, and it is nice to know that we lived in a country where we could hand out leaflets. Lest we forget that at that time there were goodly portions of the globe where you could get thrown in gulag for doing something like that.

SV: It was sad to me that so many young people glommed onto him because he was idealistic. The government is an actual real institution with real bureaucrats making real, undramatic decisions. I believe in idealism, up to a point. But I also the think the lesser of two evils is a good idea. The less evil, the better.

SV: I am a Democrat, capital D. I actually think Gore is a horrible campaigner. But the fact that he's become a joke is incredibly annoying to me. He's a joke because the Florida election system is a joke.

CP: In your chapter "The Nerd Voice," you reference the movie The Breakfast Club. And actually Rick Moody wrote something in this month's Allure about his obsession with Ally Sheedy's character in that movie. What's the deal?

SV: I was 15 when it came out, and it made a huge impression, though you could say that about the whole Ringwald oeuvre. I was always kind of between Anthony Michael Hall's character and Ally Sheedy's character. I was the kind of student who either got As or Ds, but I was also in band and French club. But you know, I am not that good-looking, and I often wonder how I escaped my youth relatively unscathed in terms of the obsession with physical perfection young girls have. I always dressed sort of plain, in dark clothes and wore my hair very simply. But the pretty girls in those years all looked like clowns, with tons of makeup and hair as high as a stevedore. I think I just lucked out because I lived in an era when the pretty girls turned themselves into Bozo. And they do it to Ally Sheedy's character in the movie, when they make her over.

SV: Being a nerd is about caring too much. In that Breakfast Club era my whole life away from school was a secret--I had a Debussy poster over my bed, and no way would I have told that to the kids at junior high. I was open with the anti-nuclear group. We showed documentaries about nuclear winter at lunch but the only people who came were the West German exchange students. To be popular you were not allowed to have interests. But the nerd voice allows you to express what you care about, by sounding aware of how nerdy you are. When I say "nerd," I think of it as a synonym for "enthusiast."

SV: I usually dread leaving my apartment, but I am constantly surprised at how great people are. By that I don't mean generically nice people. I mean very interesting and particular and specific people. So it's incredibly encouraging to meet your fellow countrymen and realize how much you like them.

Sarah Vowell appears with Zadie Smith, Jeffrey Eugenides and Arthur Bradford as part of 215’s “opening night spectacular,” Thu., Oct. 17, 7 p.m., Free Library of Philadelphia, 19th and Vine sts. Combined tickets for the readings on the 17th and 19th are $12, available through Upstages, 215-569-9700.